


Ground Rules

by orphan_account



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-17
Updated: 2013-06-17
Packaged: 2017-12-15 06:57:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/846635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah hasn’t learned yet how much it will cost her to let two worlds that were never meant to meet come together day after day, time after time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ground Rules

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/gifts).



Disclaimer: Not mine! Just playing a game!

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It’s a lot of fun at first. Sarah doesn’t feel that, having mastered the labyrinth, she automatically ought to have claim to the magic of it, but it seems to follow her, whether she is deserving or not. It’s not even a matter of magic at first, certainly not of the fantastic kind. It’s just friendship. They’re her friends, Hoggle, Ludo, Sir Didymus, and the others. She flatters herself that one trip to the Goblin City has made an adult of her and taught her all that she was lacking before; certainly she’s braver than she ever was, and she knows how to value her family for what it is instead of hating it for what it isn’t, but she hasn’t learned yet how much it will cost her to let two worlds that were never meant to meet come together day after day, time after time. 

She looks in the mirror each morning as she prepares for school, and sees them there beside her, waiting to be invited in. Nights and mornings are lost in conversing with them, dancing with them, playing with them. She tramps off to school disheveled but happy. They never harm her in anyway, except that they make everybody else seem dull by comparison.

No, they aren’t dangerous, these friends of hers. What is dangerous is what lurks behind them.

It isn’t long before she begins to sense Jareth’s presence behind the mirror, too far off to see at first, but most definitely there. She is not sure why he doesn’t just show himself right off the bat. It could be that he is afraid of her, or it could be that he is simply waiting for her to break down and ask, because he knows deep down that she dreams of him at night. She asks Hoggle one day if _he_ , if _Jareth_ , would be able to come if he wanted, and he laughs a worried laugh and tells her that _of course_ he would, as if she were silly to think that she could ever block him. Sir Didymus is of another opinion, and though he’s willing to fight anyone, any place, anywhere to the death for her sake if it should come down to it, he honestly doubts that she will need it. She’s vanquished Jareth once with her words, and she can do it again. 

_You have no power over me._

It’s a pretty sentence. It’s strong and resonant. It ties the entire scene - the entire _story_ together. She wonders how time after time, that of all things could have been the line that she would always forget. 

Then again, back when the labyrinth had been merely a child’s story, it had been the parts that excited that she’d read over and over again. The book was rife with dog-eared pages, evidence of passages lovingly read a thousand times over while others lay abandoned. Hadn’t it been the Goblin King’s power and not the girl’s that had had her captivated from the start? 

She whispers this to the mirror one day, and she thinks she sees his face flicker there. She tells him that she doesn’t want him, not yet at least, and he is gone. 

Sometimes at night a white owl flies low over head and past the window. She thinks she sees one in the tree outside her school in broad daylight one bright Tuesday afternoon, asleep with its head tucked in beneath its snowy wings.

Sometimes her wishes come true in the most inexplicable matter. Mrs. Gertrude Simmins, The math teacher that she hates, gets into a car crash on the way to school one morning, and it turns her very blood to ice. Just the other day she’d laughed at a friends’ sarcastic comment that it was a pity the old bat didn’t just die and put the rest of them out of their misery. Old Gerty, as the other girls had been prone to calling her, doesn’t make it, and Sarah’s the one who is miserable. 

“Did you do that?” She asks the man in the mirror. 

“Of course not. You did,” he whispers back. 

“I won’t have you destroying my life.” 

“Oh, won’t you? You think that I’m in control of these things, but it’s the other way around. You know in your heart that I’ve never been anything other than what you want me to be.”

“I don’t want you to be anything,” she announces. “Not even a memory. I want you to leave and be nothing at all.” 

He laughs at her in that cruel way of his. 

“You have the power to defeat me when you really choose. You’ve done it once before. I’m here because you have invited me, and because you let me in.” 

“Like a vampire.”

This produces even more laughter from him. 

“You read such stories Sarah. You’re only lucky that most of them don’t come true. Do you really think me vampire like?” 

She nods, more out of petulance than any real belief. 

“Poor girl. You know I’m nothing as vulgar as that, and I’m not here to drain your life blood but to give you new life.” 

This makes her smile in spite of herself, “That’s exactly what a vampire would say. They want to trick you you know, into becoming like them.” 

Jareth smiles back, indulgently you think. 

“You’re more like me, Sarah, than you will ever know.” 

“I won’t let you in again,” she says, and she means it. 

The mirror breaks. She breaks it, really, and pretends that it was an accident. Her step mother buys her a new one, but this one is okay. Maybe it isn’t magic. Maybe it won’t answer her questions and tell her who the strongest person in the land is. 

It’s with determination that she manages for many a week not to see the saddened faces of her friends. 

She can’t ignore them though, and she doesn’t exactly want to, any more than she wants him to go. 

“You say you only do what I want of you,” Sarah asks him one morning.

“Only and ever expressly what you want.” 

“I think then,” she says, as confident as she’s ever felt, “it’s time to set some ground rules in this relationship.”


End file.
